Blog headers & favicons

Table of contents for Mom Blogging Advice

Ready to make your blog unique? This may look like intense coding, but it’s really not that hard.

Favicons
Favicons are the little pictures that show up next to your blog’s name on the address bar. Look where it says “http://www.mamablogga.com”—see the tiny picture of Hayden? So cute.

Here’s another example (the little pink 5, the MP, the Gmail logo):
Where are your favicons?

Favicons also show up in bookmarks, which helps visitors remember your site better:
Where are your favicons? in bookmarks

I know you want one now—and you’re not alone. In fact, some of my favorite blogs are without favicons. So I made some for them:

scribbit: scribbitfavicon; An Island Life: islandlifefavicon; 5 Minutes for Mom: 5minfavicon
(If there’s one there for you, feel free to take it!)

(To make your own, create a square image and reduce it down to 16 x 16. Michelle at scribbit mentions a site that will create a favicon for you. You may want to save it as favicon.ico; read on to find out why.)

Now what? Well, if you’re your own hosting, just look through your files and find ‘favicon.ico.’ (If you’re on Bluehost (aff), for example, it’s under the www folder.) Upload your own favicon.ico and overwrite the file.

If you’re not hosting your blog yourself (i.e. you’re on wordpress.com, typepad.com or blogspot.com), don’t despair! You can get rid of the W/speech bubble/B. Upload your picture to your blog (you can use an old post that you don’t mind sticking an image in, or you can simply use a draft—the post doesn’t have to be published). Copy the location of the image. (In Blogger, it’s something like http://bp2.blogger.com/<crazy strings of letters & numbers>/favicon.ico . Replace the example.com URL in the code below with the URL of your picture:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://example.com/favicon.ico" />
<link rel="icon" href="http://example.com/favicon.ico" />

In Blogger, go to Template > Edit HTML. After the opening <head> tag, paste the above code (with your picture’s URL). Save and check it out! In WordPress & TypePad, if you can edit your <head> tags, do the same there.

Can’t find the right place? Here’s a screen shot to help. The first arrow shows the favicon code; the second shows the place for the next part.
Branding headers in Blogger

Branded Headers
Add a tagline or phrase to describe your blog in your headers: mine is “mom’s search for meaning,” scribbit’s is “A Blog About Motherhood in Alaska” (Michelle mentioned this in January).

In WordPress, there’s a plugin to help with this, though even I had trouble getting it to work for a while (now it works great). When editing your headers in Blogger, WordPress or TypePad, leave what’s already there and add something right before the </title> tag. This phrase will appear on every page on your site (and some of your friends might start using it in their links back to your blog).

Not only can this have some effect on your search engine rankings, but (more importantly in my opinion) it also helps your visitors figure out what your site is about. I know I’m very used to looking at my site; I know exactly what it’s about and how it works and how to use the navigation. However, if a visitor comes to my site for the first time, I want him/her to be able to figure out what my site is all about very quickly.

Any questions/clarifications/cries for help? Leave them in the comments and you might win a prize!

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Friday, 11 May 2007  | 21 comments »
Categories: MetaBlogging | Tags: ,

What’s RSS?

Table of contents for Mom Blogging Advice

RSS is an important acronym in the blogosphere. It’s usually interpreted as Really Simple Syndication, so we’ll start with the really simple and work our way up. I think we have something for even the most seasoned blogger here.

Basic
First, an excellent explanation of the easiest way to keep up with dozens (hundreds!) of blogs from Common Craft:


Click To Play

Also under “basics,” your blog generates an RSS feed automatically (unless you’ve disabled this feature).

Novice
FeedBurner “burns” your blog feed for you, making it easy for your readers to subscribe in any feed reader. If you click on the green “Subscribe” button in the sidebar, you’ll be taken to a page to choose your feed reader.

FeedBurner can also add a lot of cool features to your feed. You can add information at the end of messages in a feed reader like copyrights, number of comments, social bookmarking stuff—there are more than 100 “FeedFlares.” FeedBurner can also track visitors to your site and show you how many subscribers you have.

Intermediate
Many people use only partial feeds for their sites, sending only excerpts or summaries to their readers. There are a few reasons for this; among them is the legitimate concern about unscrupulous people republishing your blog with zero effort—and making money off your hard wraught writing.

However, the benefits of full feeds outweigh the risks. [UPDATE: the full story on full feeds] Also note that many people publish excerpt feeds believing that more people will visit their site to read their full posts—but FeedBurner CEO Rick Klau says they’ve seen no evidence to support that. See Partial Feeds Don’t Draw Visitors at Marketing Pilgrim for more on the subject.

In Blogger, you can switch from excerpts to full feeds by going to Settings > Site Feed. From the pull down menu, select “Full.” (If you’re in Advanced Mode, the second and third options are at your discretion.)

bloggerfullfeedsss.jpg

In WordPress, select Options > Reading.

wpfullfeedsss1.png

Under “Syndication Feeds,” for the option “For each article, show,” select “Full text.”

wpfullfeedsss2.png

See Semantically driven for details on how to switch to full feeds in TypePad.

Advanced
Make sure your readers find your FeedBurner feed (instead of the default, less user-friendly feed Blogger, WordPress or Typepad creates). You may have to code it into your site. For example, in Blogger, go to Template > Edit HTML. In your code, find the line:

<b:include data=’blog’ name=’all-head-content’/>

Delete it and replace it with the following (after you’ve customized it):

<meta content=’text/html; charset=UTF-8′ http-equiv=’Content-Type’/>
<meta content=’true’ name=’MSSmartTagsPreventParsing’/>
<meta content=’blogger’ name=’generator’/>
<link href=’http://feeds.feedburner.com/YOUR FEEDBURNER FEED NAME HERE’ rel=’alternate’ title=’YOUR BLOG NAME HERE RSS Feed’ type=’application/rss+xml’/>

Blogger now offers integration with FeedBurner. Here are the instructions on integrating your FeedBurner feed with your Blogger blog. TypePad also features this capability.

WordPress has a handy FeedBurner feed replacement plugin to do that heavy coding for you.

Total pro
If you’re comfortable in Apache, consider Daniel’s strategy for making sure that your subscribers are using the correct feed even if you leave FeedBurner (from Daily Blog Tips). (To tell the truth, I can only vaguely understand this one.)

Also, look at another post from Marketing Pilgrim (and no, this one’s not by me, it’s by Jeremy Luebke) on why you should not use click tracking on FeedBurner (read on the comments to see how to fix that).

Anybody out there quite proficient in MT/Typepad? I started on Blogger and had to learn WordPress for work before I made the switch to WordPress here on MamaBlogga. If anyone can give some pointers on the same issues on TypePad, it would be appreciated!

UPDATE: A big thank you to Jen once again at Semantically driven for explaining how to set your feed to full posts on Typepad. She had got screenshots and everything. Man, I should’ve thought of that. I’ll have to fix this. Screenshots added. Thank you, Jen!!

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Thursday, 26 April 2007  | 10 comments »
Categories: MetaBlogging | Tags: , , ,

Your own domain

Table of contents for Mom Blogging Advice

Do mom bloggers need their own domains? I might not be the most impartial person to ask, since I just made the switch from a blogspot-hosted blog to a self-hosted WordPress blog on my own domain.

However, after compiling the list of the most popular parent bloggers, I have to say that some of my opinions on the subject were challenged. As an Internet marketer, I would have told you all the live long day to get your own domain—but then nearly half of the most popular parent bloggers don’t have their own domain.

Guess what? ME.blogspot.com (or ME.typepad.com) is working just fine for them. Better than fine—great!

So I’m beginning to think that in the parent substratum of the blogopshere, it’s a lot less important to have your own domain than it would be in, say, the business world.

That being said, it’s not a bad idea—but if your blog is popular enough to make it onto the Popular Parent Bloggers list, it may not be the best idea to change.

Why not? Well, you may have a lot of Technorati clout (ie links) at your old domain (Technorati is a blog search engine, if you didn’t know. Oh, of course you knew, I meant him over there.). Michelle has taught us that Technorati links expire after six months, so you might be able to begin to outpace your old blog URL (and no, you can’t move it on Technorati) after six months, but do you want to e-mail every person that has you on their personal blogroll to get them to fix it? I wouldn’t and I’m only on a couple (thank you, ladies!)

Also important, you may have a lot of search engine clout (ie links) at your old domain as well. On the plus side, it’s possible to channel that clout to a new domain if you use something like Blogger’s Custom Domain kind of thing. You have to make sure that your URL structure doesn’t change (like mine did… gonna have to learn Apache to fix that. You can avoid this fate by consulting my guide, but I went and made things complicated on myself by changing my URL structure and now I definitely don’t want to go back).

One possible solution for someone with a lot of clout at their .blogspot or .typepad domain: if the appropriate URL is available, buy it (I’ve had good experiences with www.GoDaddy.com ) and redirect it to your .blogspot or .typepad blog instead of the other way around. (if given an option, use a 301 redirect). You can also select the option of “masking” the domain so that even though someone is redirected to ME.blogspot.com, their address bar still reads “www.ME.com.” (With GoDaddy, both of these functions are accessible under Domain Forwarding.)

Of course, Technorati doesn’t understand redirects at all, so it may see www.ME.com as a second blog with the same content as your first one (which it actually does to me… it’s really annoying). But you know what? Technorati isn’t the be-all and end-all of your blog.

Disclosure: the GoDaddy link is an affiliate link.

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Wednesday, 18 April 2007  | 5 comments »
Categories: MetaBlogging | Tags: 

A little advice to mom bloggers

Table of contents for Mom Blogging Advice

As I did my research for the Popular Parent Bloggers list, I was surprised at a few of the trends I found. As an Internet marketer, I could see a few things that definitely needed attention repeated over and over again. So, here’s some general, technical advice to all mom bloggers (and please don’t feel targeted if you’re on the PPB list; I think you’re already awesome).

  1. Although every blogger and his/her dog will tell you that if you’re serious, you should be on your own domain, I don’t think that it really hurts your blog’s popularity if you’re a momblogger. Sacrilege, I know. However, nearly 50% of the original Popular Parent Bloggers list are hosted on BlogSpot (12) or Typepad (2), including 3 of the top 10. However, you may still want to have your own domain, if it’s available. That topic deserves its own post, maybe next week.
  2. If you have your blog on your own domain, and you have control over your hosting, implement a 301 redirect to create a canonical URL inmediatamente (immediately).UPDATE (27 June 2007): If you run your blog on WordPress, UrbanGiraffe has a handy plugin that will do all this for you, Redirection. (This particular trick is found under Manage>Redirection>Options.)

    If you don’t have WordPress, don’t worry, I’ll tell you how. Probably the most general way I can tell you to do this is to get into whatever kind of file manager your hosting service offers and find a file named .htaccess . Edit it, adding this:

    RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

    (For some reason, mine only worked if I put it after the WordPress stuff already in my .htaccess file, without the first two lines above.) Of course, if your site isn’t .com, change it to the correct extension.

    What does that do? That makes it so when someone types in or links to “yourdomain.com,” it’s automatically redirected to “www.yourdomain.com.”

    Don’t want the www? Use this code to redirect www.yourdomain.com to yourdomain.com:

    RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^yourdomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

    Why does that really make any difference? Your traffic, links and search engine ranking are divided between the www and non-www versions of the site until you implement a 301 (permanent) redirect like this.

  3. And, as always, I like to refer you to Michelle at Scribbit, a blog about motherhood in Alaska, for her latest tip: The Biggest Technorati Tip in the World.

Mom bloggers, if you have any other technical blogging questions, feel free to e-mail me blog (at) mamablogga.com

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Friday, 13 April 2007  | 5 comments »
Categories: MetaBlogging | Tags: ,

Why I miss Blogger

After a week here in WordPress and my own domain, I have to admit that there are some things I miss about Blogger. I don’t regret switching to WordPress, but there were a couple things that I liked or even preferred about Blogger.

  1. And a big #1: Label posts without opening them. Labeling posts is roughly equivalent to putting them in categories or tagging them. In Blogger, you just check a box next to the post title on your post editing page and label them (like you might in GMail). Yeah.
  2. I felt cool using Greasemonkey to ‘pimp’ my Blogger. It was actually the initial reason I downloaded Greasemonkey for Firefox. Sure, WordPress has ‘plugins,’ but I feel like so much less of a haX0r.
  3. Set up another blog in like no minutes. Yeah, this is probably why there are so many splogs on blogspot, but it’s fun. I set up five different blogs, with different topics, on one account.
  4. It’s easier to tweak your template. I’m really scared of ruining my perfect php files on WordPress. With Blogger, I was relatively confident in tweaking the CSS and HTML. Sometimes I ruined things; then I hit ‘clear changes.’
  5. It’s easy in general. Everything is simpler in Blogger. It’s a simpler platform. WordPress is a ‘professional’ platform.
  6. It’s totally free. Okay, so WordPress itself is free, and if I were hosted on WordPress.com, that would be just as free. But hosting my own site is not free. I’m okay with that, though, since I have a job now.

So, after seven days, there are a few things I miss about Blogger, but I’m definitely not done customizing my WordPress yet with some more cool plugins.

Remember, you can stay with Blogger if you want, but here’s how to switch to WordPress if you’d prefer.

Wednesday, 28 March 2007  | 2 comments »
Categories: MetaBlogging | Tags: ,

The Ultimate Guide to Migrating from Blogger to WordPress

Table of contents for Migrating your blog

UPDATED 13 July 07 (step 6)

I assume that you want to move from yourblog.blogspot.com to www.yourblog.com. Otherwise, I say, don’t bother. There’s no benefit to moving from yourblog.blogspot.com to yourblog.wordpress.com unless you really want to use WordPress. I recommend, if you like your Blogger template (especially if you’ve heavily customized it), using Blogger’s capability to publish to your own custom domain (WordPress’s similar feature is a paid add-on). If you want to, you can stay with Blogger. The blogging police won’t come and get you.

But if you’re sure you want to switch, then here’s what you do.

1. Get a domain. Don’t own a domain? I recommend www.GoDaddy.com for domain registration; I use them mostly because I’d heard of them before. Their prices are okay. I recommend three things here:

  • Get private domain registration. No junk mail, no strangers getting your address from your whois info.
  • If available, get yourblog.com , yourblog.net and yourblog.org. Sometimes GoDaddy offers a deal where you can get free private registration when you register 3 domains. (Then redirect .org and .net to the .com using account management. Select 301 redirects.)
  • Search for “GoDaddy coupon.” Click on the first result and use whichever coupon will save you the most money (calculate out the % to see which one that is if you have to).

2. Get hosting. I recommend Bluehost.com; they came highly recommended and are a pretty good deal. Also, they’re one of WordPress’s recommended hosts and feature a very simple install for WordPress.

3. Install WordPress. With Bluehost, just login to your control panel, click on Fantastico under Addons/Plugins, select WordPress on the left, click New Installation on the right. Fill in the forms and you’re done. If your host doesn’t have a similar install, you’ll have to install manually. It shouldn’t be too hard; WordPress gives you instructions.

4. Login to your WordPress (might take a little time for the installation to “take”). Select “Options” then “Permalinks.” Select “Custom” and type this line in the box:

/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html

5. Import your blog from Blogger. You absolutely MUST use the Blogger RSS Import plugin. If this link doesn’t work, try again later. Follow its directions. It loves you. One day it will be included in WordPress. This brings all your posts and comments over.

UPDATE, 16 May 07: That day is today. This import function is included in WordPress 2.2. The other steps here are still important, though, to maintain your permalinks.

6. Delete the Blogger RSS Import plugin from your website. COMPLETELY.

UPDATE, 13 July 07: Now, Blogger enables you to transfer your subscribers seemlessly as well. If you haven’t already, sign up for a FeedBurner account. Then, login to Blogger and go to Settings > Site Feed. In the Post Feed Redirect URL box, enter your new FeedBurner address. This will redirect your subscribers, but you’ll want to be sure to integrate your FeedBurner feed with your new WordPress blog. (FeedSmith, owned by FeedBurner, is a plugin that does just that!)

7. Still in Blogger, select Settings for the blog you want to transfer. Select Publishing. Click the top link, “Custom domain.” Type in your new domain, www.yourblog.com. Save. Now all your links will transfer automatically to your own domain, all your posts are on WordPress and you’re ready to blog on wit’ yo’ bad self.

Afternote. Clean up: You might have to import your images to WordPress as well. If they suddenly stop showing up on WordPress, then you need to import them. If you don’t have very many (I think I have 80-90 and I’ll end up doing this by hand because I’m afraid of the warnings on established plugins), you can easily “recode” your pictures. Login to your WordPress in one tab/window and login at http://picasaweb.google.com/ in another. In Picasa, click on the album for your blog. Select the photo you’re replacing in WordPress. On the right side, click on “Link to this Post” and copy the first link they give you. In WordPress, edit the appropriate post, looking at the code tab, and replace the link that follows the code <img src= with the link you just copied from Picasa. I think that will continue to work.

Also, unfortunately, your Technorati links will not move with your blog. HOWEVER, links themselves are redirected.

Disclosure: the GoDaddy and Bluehost links are affiliate links.

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Tuesday, 27 March 2007  | 33 comments »
Categories: MetaBlogging | Tags: , , , ,

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